Hello to all. I say it once again. My
name is Benoît Talleu, I am 17 years old. I am from Vietnam but they adopted me
as a baby.

My parents adopted seven children, and I am the oldest.
[screaming] I am in this fight against gay adoption, along with associations for
adopted children, because I have seen how this discussion has unfolded. People
talk about this as if the primary concern were not US — the adopted children,
ourselves.

If you ask what adoptees want, they will give you only one
answer: ONE MOTHER, ONE FATHER. The words “mommy and daddy” are the first words
that an adoptee learns. Adoptions allow an orphan who has no parents to place a
face on these words.

The orphan — He dreams of his future parents. He
imagines them. The desire comes from the depths of his being, this desire for a
mother and a father. And it is the orphan that must be heeded first. We must
state this with full clarity: For an orphan, there must be a father and a
mother.

The difference here is between “needing” and
“wanting.”

The orphan needs a mom and a dad.

The couple “wants” a
child.

Between “needing” and “wanting,” I leave it to you to
choose.

Is adoption a way of offering a baby to parents who don’t have
any?

Adopting is not only for people who are sterile. It is not a
necessity that a couple be sterile to adopt. Adoption is NOT a remedy to make
sterile people feel better. We are not a remedy. We are not medications. We are
not here to make you feel better because of the natural agony you
feel over having no child.

We are not a prize for you, we are not a
right for you. You engage in violence to speak of us as if you have a right,
being us. Our biological mothers had the courage to entrust us with an
orphanage. That doesn’t mean that we are objects. She may have been in a
hopeless situation, perhaps there was no father around. She couldn’t make it,
but that is not an insult to us.

To give gay couples the “right” to us is
a betrayal. It betrays our biological mother’s trust and courage. The orphan
needs a mother and father. That is not to denounce gay rights to adopt. It is
merely to state a creed:

ALL BORN OF MAN AND WOMAN. ALL ADOPTED BY MAN
AND WOMAN.

We hear people say, “living with a gay couple is better than
staying in an orphanage.” Hear what I say about such an assertion: That
statement reeks of dishonesty. There are tens of thousands of hetero couples
waiting to adopt us.

They say: “a gay couple is better than nothing.”
That is shocking. THAT IS HOMOPHOBIA!

The best thing for a child is to
have a mom and dad. I will not cease to repeat it. To say that an orphan,
because it is in an orphanage, does not deserve to have any mother, or does not
deserve to have any father, that is CRUEL! IT IS UNJUST! IT IS A DENIAL OF
EQUALITY!

Listen here– they have already said that insemination and
surrogacy have been struck as provisions from the law for gay marriage and
adoption. And I ask you — what is bad for a child who comes from insemination
and surrogacy, can it be good for an adopted child? Yes, gay couples may be in
love, I do not doubt that. But the needs of the baby in that orphanage WILL NOT
CHANGE. The demands we state on behalf of that baby WILL NOT CHANGE.

We
hear, “oh things have evolved. So many countries are okay with gay marriage.”
But I tell you — we are a great nation. We are a great democracy.

THIS
BILL FOR GAY MARRIAGE IS PURE SELFISHNESS. THE LAW BELONGS TO PROTECTION OF THE
WEAK, NOT TO PANDER TO THOSE WHO ARE STRONGEST. Mothers and fathers exist for
children, not the other way around.

France is the nation where the rights
of man were born. So we are also the nation for the rights of the child. We are
not the nation where children are a right, we are a nation where children have
rights.

Mr. President, I tell you now, that we are the ones who matter
in all this — by this I mean all orphans, all orphanages, all adopted
children.